All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
- Toni Morrison Quote

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
- Toni Morrison Quote

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
- Toni Morrison Quote

For a long time I was convinced that the conflict between Jewish people and black people in this country was a media event.
- Toni Morrison Quote

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.
- Toni Morrison Quote

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
- Toni Morrison Quote

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
- Toni Morrison Quote

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
- Toni Morrison Quote

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
- Toni Morrison Quote

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.
- Toni Morrison Quote

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.
- Toni Morrison Quote

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
- Toni Morrison Quote

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
- Toni Morrison Quote